Monthly Archives: November 2015

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1835 – BIRTH OF MARK TWAIN
“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of the speculator in lands and mines this remark: — ‘I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.’ “
Classic Twain!

DECEMBER 1

1135 – DEATH OF KING HENRY I OF ENGLAND
About 1100, King Henry, short on gold money, created a unique form of government issued money – Tally Sticks. These sticks were just that – polished pieces or sticks of wood with notches of a certain size to indicated the value of the wood. They were declared by the King as money and issued for purchases. They were accepted by the King for payment of taxes. Tally Sticks was an accepted debt-free government-issued money system of England for over 700 years, including the period of the rise of the British Empire.

1896 – PRELIMINARY MEETING OF INDIANAPOLIS MONETARY CONVENTION
Organized by those connected to J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller (the two most powerful bankers, if not businessmen, in the US at the time), a gathering was organized one month after William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan for President to address monetary issues. The economic power elite, which had back McKinley and his support for money backed by gold, realized a pure gold standard prevented the issuance of new money when needed to meet a growing economy. Rather than directly proposing a more “elastic” monetary system or the creation of a banker controlled central bank themselves, the bankers deliberately organized a gathering of businessmen, economists, and other academics, as well as bankers, in the nation’s heartland.
A preliminary meeting was held on December 1 with a larger gathering on January 12, 1897. The effort was to camouflage the interests of the major banking interests and convince the public and Congress of the existence of a grassroots movement for real monetary reform. The Indianapolis Monetary Convention urged President McKinley to continue the gold standard, and create a new system of “elastic” bank credit. To that end, the convention urged the president to appoint a new monetary commission to prepare legislation for a new revised monetary system.
A more in-depth report from what became the Indianapolis Monetary Commission was first published on December 1 of the following year in Sound Money magazine. This provided the political cover for the introduction in Congress of a bill to create what eventually became the US. Federal Reserve Act, creating the Federal Reserve System.

DECEMBER 2

1968 – US PRESIDENT NIXON NAMES HENRY KISSINGER SECURITY ADVISOR
William Engdahl asserts in his introduction to Gods of Money that President Nixon Cabinet member Henry Kissinger, a protégé of the powerful Rockefeller circles, stated: “If you control the oil, you control entire nations; if you control the food, you control the people; if you control the money, you control the entire world.”

1975 – DEATH OF GRAHAM TOWERS, GOVERNOR, BANK OF CANADA, 1934-54
“Each and every time a bank makes a loan, new bank credit is created – new deposits – brand new money.”

2013 – INTERVIEW ON OF RODNEY SHAKESPEARE, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Q: Do you share this optimism about Iceland’s financial recovery?
Rodney Shakespeare: “Iceland is quite right to make an upright challenge to the global financial system. Unless you say that you are going to throw it out the window, they will always succeed in creating money out of nothing, lending to you with administration cost and interest, lending it for anything except the real economy. Lending it for anything except the spreading of the real economy and putting you into debt. And the debt becomes repayable.
You must rely on your own national bank for your own uses, for your own real economy and for the spreading of it. And if you don’t do that, you’ll be trapped in debt in the same way that …. well, you’ve got Greece, you’ve got Iceland, you’ve got every country in the world trapped in increasing debt and all that happens is that they increase the levels of the debt and smash the populations down.”

DECEMBER 5

1782 – BIRTH OF MARTIN VAN BUREN, 8TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
“The MONEY POWER…when firmly established, was destined to become the only kind of an Aristocracy that could exist in our political system.” (Note: Van Buren always capitalized “MONEY POWER” when using the term.)
Van Buren was Vice President when President Jackson refused to support the re-chartering of the private, misnamed “Second Bank of the United States” – the nation’s central bank at the time (equivalent in some ways to the Federal Reserve Bank of today). The Bank had originally been chartered for 20 years in 1816. A corporate charter was considered then a democratic tool, a means for the public to define the actions of a corporation to ensure it remained subordinate to meeting public needs (something We the People have forgotten today). After the Bank charter was dissolved (which meant the Bank could no longer create money as debt), Jackson and Van Buren sought to replace the money system with coinage or bank notes convertible to gold/silver. But this was an insufficient amount of currency needed to supply the growing the US economy. Currency contracted. The nation experienced the worst depression up to that time beginning in 1837.

DECEMBER 6

1921 – THOMAS EDISON QUOTE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES
“If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good… If the Government issues bonds, the brokers will sell them. The bonds will be negotiable; they will be considered as gilt edged paper. Why? Because the government is behind them, but who is behind the Government? The people. Therefore it is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have the benefit of their own gilt-edged credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency… instead of the bankers receiving the benefit of the people’s credit in interest-bearing bonds?”

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Why this calendar? Many people have questions about the root causes of our economic problems. Some questions involve money, banks and debt. How is money created? Why do banks control its quantity? How has the money system been used to liberate (not often) and oppress (most often) us? And how can the money system be “democratized” to rebuild our economy and society, create jobs and reduce debt? Our goal is to inform, intrigue and inspire through bite size weekly postings listing important events and quotes from prominent individuals (both past and present) on money, banking and how the money system can help people and the planet. We hope the sharing of bits of buried history will illuminate monetary and banking issues and empower you with others to create real economic and political justice. This calendar is a project of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee. Adele Looney, Phyllis Titus, Donna Schall, Leah Davis, Alice Francini, Deb Jose and Greg Coleridge helped in its development. Please forward this to others and encourage them to subscribe. To subscribe/unsubscribe or to comment on any entry, email monetarycalendar@yahoo.com

Want another reason to oppose the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement the U.S. administration and its corporate backers will soon try to ram down the throats of Congress? How about this one: any information or material posted on the internet could be removed, at least temporarily, if anyone (i.e. politician, corporate CEO, military official, etc.) claims the information or material has copyright over it.

From article below:

“In effect, ISPs are turned into “copyright cops” who are obliged to take down anything that anyone claims to have copyright over at any time, before any review of the material or its use takes place.

This means, for example, that governments can have politically embarrassing material or critical reports scrubbed from the web by merely claiming (even falsely) that the report reproduces “copyrighted” material like government documents or broadcasts of government committee hearings. Sound far-fetched? As the Electronic Frontiers Foundation has documented this is exactly how these types of laws have been used dozens of times, as when the Canadian Auditor General demanded the takedown of newspaper reports that published a section of a government report on immigration or DHS demanded the takedown of “conspiracy theory” videos on YouTube that were critical of the US government.

…

“These provisions serve no other purpose than to further stifle free speech, private property rights, and creative expression throughout the TPP area. If only someone had told the negotiators that intellectual property doesn’t exist.”

We summarize last week’s activities; share upcoming events for next week; and interview Lee Brooker with Kent Citizens for Democracy on their successful ballot initiative to create a “Democracy Day” in Kent and in support of a Congressional Constitutional Amendment declaring that only human beings, not corporations, are persons with inalienable rights and that money is not equivalent to speech and, thus, can and should be regulated in elections.

Interview with Lee Brooker, facilitator of Kent Citizens for Democracy. The group waged a successful citizen initiative campaign, despite opposition from the City of Kent, to place a measure on the November ballot calling for an annual “Democracy Day” public hearing on money in elections and for a Congressional Constitutional Amendment to end corporate personhood and money as speech. The initiative passed with 64% of the vote. Lee discusses the issues, the campaign, the challenge before the Ohio Supreme Court, and lessons learned for other communities.

1910 – JEKYLL ISLAND MEETING TO PLAN FOR US PRIVATE CENTRAL BANK
Attending this secret meeting were US Senator Nelson Aldrich; A. Piatt Andrew, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Frank Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York; Henry P. Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company; D. Norton, president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York; Benjamin Strong (a lieutenant of J.P. Morgan); and Paul Warburg, connected to the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb. The meeting would lead to the Aldrich bill, which eventually led to the Federal Reserve Act, passed in 1913.

2000 – WRITTEN ANSWER TO LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY, HOUSE OF LORDS, BY JAMES ROBERTSON, CO-AUTHOR OF “MONETARY REFORM – MAKING IT HAPPEN”
“Many people, even in government and parliament, don’t know how new money is now created, and what the consequences are. Most people find it hard to believe, if they think about it at all, that almost all the money in circulation has been created by commercial banks at profit to themselves. In reply to questions, a government spokesman may say that the funds which banks lend to customers ‘must either be obtained from depositors or the sterling money market, both of which usually require the payment of interest’ – thus appearing to deny that banks are allowed to create new money and to profit from doing so.”

NOVEMBER 24

1911 – AMERICAN BANKERS’ ASSOCIATION ENDORSES SO-CALLED “MONETARY REFORM” PLAN
The ABA at their annual conference in N. Orleans endorsed a “monetary reform” plan by U.S. Senator Nelson Aldrich. The plan was actually to deform the ability of citizens to create and distribute their/own own money (see November 23, 1910 posting above).

NOVEMBER 25

1874 – GREENBACK PARTY FOUNDED
The Greenback Party was founded on this day at a convention in Indianapolis. Many of its members were farmers hurt by the financial Panic of 1873 (also known as the “Crime of ‘73”). The party supported “Greenback” paper money (U.S. Notes) issued and spent into circulation by the Lincoln administration. They opposed all money systems backed by any precious metal, believing that those who owned gold or silver (banks and corporations) would possess the power to define the value of products and labor. Government control of the US money system would also ensure sufficient quantity of money was in circulation to help small businesses and farmers. Twenty-one independent congressmen, mostly Greenbackers, were elected in 1878.

2008 – QUANTITATIVE EASING (QE) PROGRAM ANNOUNCED BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE
The Fed announced that on December 1 it would create money and use it to purchase $500 billion in toxic mortgage backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and an additional $100 billion of debt from both entities. This phase of QE (called QE1) extended until March 2010. Two additional rounds, QE2 and QE3, followed it. A total of $4.4 trillion from the Fed was issued. It went disproportionately to financial corporations (Wall Street), not “Main Street” (for small businesses) or to “Side Streets” (to bail out homeowners facing foreclosures). QE money was also spent to purchase US Treasury bonds (debt) following the decline of purchases by other nations as a means to stimulate the economy. At its peak, $85 billion per month in Treasury debt and mortgage backed securities was purchased. Many within the financial industry have since admitted that QE contributed to the rising gap between rich and poor and the rise and size of too-big-to-fail banking corporations.

NOVEMBER 26

1865 – “ALICE IN WONDERLAND” BY LEWIS CARROLL PUBLISHED IN THE US
The establishment of a European Monetary Union in 1993 was a bold experiment. It created a single monetary system overlaying individual nation states with their own political systems. William Buiter, member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, said ‘It’s a bold step into the unknown. Not unlike Alice [in Wonderland]’s leap down the rabbit hole.”

2014 – “DEBATE OVER MONETARY SYSTEM GROWS” ARTICLE PUBLISHED ON DEUTSCHE WELLE (GERMANY’S INTERNATIONAL BROADCAST WEBSITE)
“Nearly all money is created by commercial banks in the act of lending. They also decide whom to lend it to, and for what purposes. Is this good for the economy? A growing movement is arguing for an alternative.” http://www.dw.com/en/debate-over-monetary-system-grows/a-18100679

NOVEMBER 29

1820 – DEATH OF WILLIAM RICHARDSON DAVIS, GOVERNOR OF N. CAROLINA AND DELEGATE TO THE 1787 US CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
“So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation.”

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Why this calendar? Many people have questions about the root causes of our economic problems. Some questions involve money, banks and debt. How is money created? Why do banks control its quantity? How has the money system been used to liberate (not often) and oppress (most often) us? And how can the money system be “democratized” to rebuild our economy and society, create jobs and reduce debt? Our goal is to inform, intrigue and inspire through bite size weekly postings listing important events and quotes from prominent individuals (both past and present) on money, banking and how the money system can help people and the planet. We hope the sharing of bits of buried history will illuminate monetary and banking issues and empower you with others to create real economic and political justice. This calendar is a project of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee. Adele Looney, Phyllis Titus, Donna Schall, Leah Davis, Alice Francini, Deb Jose and Greg Coleridge helped in its development. Please forward this to others and encourage them to subscribe. To subscribe/unsubscribe or to comment on any entry, email monetarycalendar@yahoo.com